Dr. Robert L. Devaney

Dr. Robert L. Devaney is Professor of Mathematics at Boston University. He earned his undergraduate degree from the College of the Holy Cross and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His main area of research is dynamical systems, including chaos.

Professor Devaney's teaching has been recognized with many awards, including the Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence, the Scholar/Teacher of the Year, and the Metcalf Award for Teaching Excellence, all from Boston University; and the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished University Teaching from the Mathematical Association of America. In 2002 he received a National Science Foundation Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, as well as the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics Award for Excellence and Innovation with the Use of Technology in Collegiate Mathematics. In 2004 he was named the Carnegie/CASE Massachusetts Professor of the Year, and in 2009 he was inducted into the Massachusetts Mathematics Educators Hall of Fame.

Since 1989 Professor Devaney has been director of the National Science Foundation's Dynamical Systems and Technology Project, leading to a wide array of computer programs for exploring dynamical systems. He also produced the Mandelbrot Set Explorer, an online, interactive series to introduce students at all levels to the mathematics behind the fractal images known as the Mandelbrot and Julia sets.

In addition to writing many professional papers and books, Professor Devaney is the coauthor of Differential Equations, a textbook now in its 4th edition, which takes a fundamentally visual approach to solving ordinary differential equations.